


What You Call Love

by pcysarcasm



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: (semi) hate to love, Blind Character, Blindess, Kinda Dark, Light Angst, M/M, Mentions of sex and sexual intimacy, References to Illness, Violinist!Mark, alternative universe, blind donghyuck, blind!heachan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18979156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pcysarcasm/pseuds/pcysarcasm
Summary: Donghyuck is, among many things, blind and isolated. Until, of course, he recognizes something in the sound of Mark Lee, his caretaker  and outstanding violinist.





	What You Call Love

**Author's Note:**

> This story goes into territory I did not expect it to tread – dark and sad places – but it's also a tender sort of love story about two damaged people tenuously connecting. 
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated.  
> Happy reading!

Moongleam bleeds silver through white lace curtains. The window is half open, the air cold. On the wall is Moomin, sitting on a cloud and ringed by numbers. His arms frozen wide open. The glock doesn’t move or tick or tock. It just offers a determined, stunted flicker. But Moomin smiles a dreamy smile and points gleefully at the numbers Two and Nine. It’s two forty-five. Lightyears from midnight.

There is no sound, no music. There are only two sheets and there he lies, in the old bed of his parents, a king-size expanse. Thin and covered in sweat. There’s a trickle of a pipe in the bathroom, and a flutter of birds in the trees of the high-fenced backyard. A “Japanese garden,” his father called it. A small wooden bridge, the bed of stunted, un-flowering irises choked with weeds.

Haechan just lies there and doesn’t toss, doesn’t move. He’s pinned rigid, like he’s trapped down, held. Only his eyelids fibrillate. They flicker like a projection reel. Behind them there’s noise. Things surfacing from a shallow burial, spilling over, undone and unbidden. Sometimes he twitches. 

 

* * *

 

It feels dark when he eases the front door shut. His skin is moist from the shower. The pavement is cool beneath his bare feet. He moves quickly through streets familiar like his own skin. It’s a straight and well worn path. He glides silently forward, round shouldered and tilted, his chest tight.

There is no traffic, so Heachan doesn’t pause for crossings. The breeze chills his back, makes his skin taut. He is ghosted by pale streetlights. A car door slams distantly. He’s almost there and he knows. Past a sleeping a cafe. Past the shadow of the hospital. Haechan turns and his pace quickens. He smells fresh baking cake.

And a moment later he’s on the tick boards of the harbour platform, breathing hard. The last crossing is four steps long. He pulls left, and follows the path as sand ruins the rhythm of his steps. The breeze gets sharper.

Haechan slows, then stops. Clicks his fingers. Taps the ground and quickly locates his rock. He sits and its smooth skin is cool. He cradles a cheap plastic container in his lap and wipes away the sand. His fingers move with careful method as he threads the sinker and hook easily before windmilling the line, flinging it deep. He hears a slap and fizzle, and feels the swallowed weight slide. Now he settles and leans back, keeping the line taut in his fingers.

Below him, Heachan can feel the waves; in rhythm with the undertow he absorbs through this thread, like a pulse. He never winds the line, just holds it, not really expecting to catch anything. Shutting useless eyes, he inhales.

 

* * *

 

It’s very early in the morning when Mark arrives at the sea. He is accompanied by a white bucket and a thermos. He peers over to where the boy should be and sees a head of strawberry blonde hair. The tips of the boy’s two ears are peeling pink and the golden tan of his shoulders are stark against his white shirt. So small and childlike this boy is, seated there in the mud. Sometimes Mark finds him here curled and sleeping, still fisting the line.

“I know you are there,” the boy mutters. His eyes which are a stunning sea-green, a color so unusual that at first Mark’d assumed to be artificial, some fancy colored contacts, keep staring straight forward onto the sea.

Mark can’t suppress a smile and lets himself down, not too far from the boy. “Morning,” he says, not so sure what else to say.

The boy worries him, always has, though he could never say why. He’s not weak. Lonely, maybe. But saying something could headbutt a landmine, Mark knows. He has seen the boys tumble badly from the top of those rocks and the first thing he did was lash out at the people who tried to help him up. Mark has always sense that boundrady with him, and he’s always been mindful about it.

“You don’t say much, do you?” he asks the boy. And then there’s an expectant pause.

Haechan raises his eyebrows and his lips parted—as if this were a test, a vocabulary word, a spelling bee. “I don’t?”

Mark shrugs and then gives the boy a lopsided smirk. "I don’t know,” he says. “Not really.” But he knows that people who don't say much are actually saying lots inside.

“To tell the truth, I’m not much a talker myself but I’m not sure if it’s a good thing," he says. 

“Why?”

“All it does is distance people.”

Haechan laughs. A laugh that sounds kinda sad, Mark thinks. But he doesn’t have the nerve—the aggressiveness, the imposing persuasivenes. Oh, what’s the point, he thinks, what is the point in hounding the poor boy? Why is he even doing this?

“I know we all have things we can’t tell anyone and moments when we just want to be alone,” he says. “But sometimes, watching you… I know this might sound a little condescending but…”

“But what?”

Mark hesitates. “I feel sorry for you.”

“So?”

Mark bites down on his bottom lip. Hard. “That’s not what I mean.”

He leans back against the cold stone and goes back to being quiet. The heat slowly becomes thick. A waning breeze brushes his face. A ribbed cloud overhead is like scattered sheeps. Mark squints and stares at the waves of the sea. Down the road, just a few blocks away is the street where his family used to live, and as a child he would go here very often. Here, he learned how to swim and build castles of sand.

Today he can feel their old house sending out uninterpretable signals, telegraphing its absence, since of course it isn’t there any longer. He thinks about going over to look at the site. What was left? Mark wonders. Is it just a grassy lot? Is there a new house where the old one once stood? Is there anything left that he could recognize?

Something about this thought makes him feel weird. Very vulnerable and unsettled, and he finds himself thinking about what his mother once said. Most people waste their lives in one way or another.

I have to change directions, he thinks. A person can use his life wisely, if he just thinks about it. If he just makes a plan, and sticks to it! If he just could turn his life around.

“Do you ever feel like you are waiting for something to happen, but you don’t know what it is?,” he says out loud, more to himself then the boy next to him.

And, of course, Heachan stays silent like he always does. Just stares a head with his motionless eyes.

“It’s that thing that could make your life special, you know,” he mutters on. “And you ask yourself what could that be. And that’s the point, I guess. Nothing is ever good enough, isn’t it? Aren’t we hopeless losers...”

Haechan doesn’t even blink. “You’re right. I am just a loser. A little blind kid. But I’m not hollow.” His voice breaks. It’s a soft voice, warm even, and Mark is shocked by the sound of it. It's not often that Heachan raises his voice or shows any kind of reaction, really. And Mark certainly isn't prepared for such an emotional reaction from the usually quiet and reserved boy. 

“Don’t look,” Haechan demands. “I’m pathetic now, so don’t look.”

And Mark does as told and focuses on the lines on his hands again. His useless hands. “I’m not,” he says. And regrets. He wishes to see how Heachan’s eyes are full of emotions, vulnerable.

“Tell me what do you think about death?” Haechan suddenly asks, his voice a little shaky. Mark wonders if the boy is crying. And how that would look like. He has never seen the boy do anything else but scowl. Well, besides his trademark blank-expression.

Mark shrugs awkwardly. Thank god Haechan can't see it. “Death is nothing special. Everyone dies in the end, so it’s nothing special at all,” he says, with an almost convincing amount of confidence. Almost.

Heachan is quiet for a moment taking that in. “The way you die says how you’ve lived,” he then says.

“Is life special?” Mark asks. “Against the whole world or all of history…. one life is nothing special. Even for me, who is living it, it’s nothing… important.”

“Hmm,” Haechan hums. He presses his thumb against his palm. “The sun in the sky it’s nothing unusual. But it’s important that it’s there. Death’s like that. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Mark mumbles, and glances at Heachan, his dark hair tickling his cheek. “If there’s a god…”

“There’s no such thing.”

“I mean god, not a thing. I bet he’s watching us from beyond the clouds.”

“How irritating,” Haechan scowls. Suddenly, he collects his tackle and spool, pushes himself upright and stretches. He clumsily climbs back up and Mark watches him move further away until he’s gone.

 

* * *

 

The pavement is hot. Haechan smells sunscreen and coffee. Restaurants yawn open for early lunch but the suburban streets are sleepy and quiet. He keeps to the shade and waves his way, choosing roads at random. He doesn’t really feel like going home just yet. Sweat coasts his lean body.

Haechan hasn't always been blind. He has seen enough, too much. He lost his sight when his mother liver haemorrhaged. She drowned in her own blood. It happened in an office, where she worked. Heachan wasn’t there, he didn’t see it.

When he was told she’s dead, Heachan said, “No, she isn’t.”

But he was a child back then. His dad wasn’t, technically, but he was gone by then. His dad still sends a letter once a year; each as useless as the first one he left. And all Haechan wants is distance. And once a year, he doesn’t reply. So his dad doesn’t know about the sea, about waves, about Mark. About staying.

Haechan walks through streets he grew up in. Streets he explored as a child on a bicycle. Though they are now renovated, he knows these streets. If he wants, he can canjure a map of the village, a network of space and place and roads. A map with a boundary, and like Mark, he stays within it. He knows his way to the sea. East to the market. North to the woods and south to the South Beach.

He knows these streets because he depends on it. And there’s no warm feeling of community, though people know – remember – him. When someone speaks to him they do so briefly, with a fence between them and him.

And Heachan doesn’t need community, or even want it. It’s just a simple need of his to be outside. Moving. Maybe because staying still remembers him of that unbearable period of no movement that kept him locked inside, back then, after he lost his sight.

He had refused a cane back then. Refused all assistance. After a year indoors he broke. He burst outside and attempted to navigate his own way. His chest was pounding. He rounded two blocks before he stumbled over his own feet and when he woke, only darkness was familiar. He had no idea where he was and so he screamed.

He was bought home eventually by the hospital staff. A week later, a doctor arrived at his door and introduced him to a younger, louder Mark. Desperate, he agreed to be helped.

The first day, Mark evaluated Haechan’s mobility. They set out cautiously in the morning. Haechan clutched Mark’s arm, but kept him apart. Put on a straight, dead, unwavering stare and scowled at his caretaker. He only spoke in mumbles, protecting a proud, childish dignity. But it didn’t last.

They walked fast and Mark was astounded by his orientation. They walked all day. This is what they did for the whole first week. They adopted each other immediately. Their trust was instant. Separately, they were clumsy, but together, they were focused.

He taught Haechan to listen, because sound, Mark said, was his most important sense. Then, Haechan was allowed to walk alone, confidently moving in his space and Mark walking behind him in close distance. And at the end of each day, he began teaching Heachan braille beneath an old tree. Heachan absorbed it hungrily. Reading was like being outside again.

Then after a month, Haechan started to ask quiet questions. Mark was about to be expelled from school. He had just failed his exams gloriously. And his greatest weakness was distraction. Like a dog who had to sniff things, lick things chase things, roll in things, Mark had to react to any noise around him. This was his last chance.

In Heachan, Mark had suddenly discovered his duty. He became protective and took his job seriously. He cut the bullshit and graduated at the end of that summer.

One of the nice things about Mark is that he doesn’t know much about his past. They don’t talk, for example, about Heachan’s mother and father, or the way he lost his eyesight. The fact that people at town have known about it has always felt like an invasion of privacy.

A secretary had once given Haechan condolences, and Heachan had nodded, though actually he found it kind of repulsive that this stranger should know his business. How dare you, he thought later. But Mark has never said a word of condolence, though he guesses that probably he knows. He knows the basics, anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s afternoon. Five days to Christmas, only a few left in the year. On the stove, water simmers in a huge steel pot. Mark empties two bags of fresh tea over it and compresses the mound with a potato masher before setting the lid.

He turns up the heat and gets out of the kitchen. The air is cool. A web of fairy lights are loosely draped over next door’s tree and gives the backyard a twilight glow. To his right, sits his favourite thing in the world. Marks picks his violin up and gently strokes over the dark wood.

He tries to concentrate but it’s hard. He feels agitated. But he has to, he has to play, it’s dark already. Then he begins to play. Eyes shut, intent. Trying not to notice the distant acoustics of the open air. Trying to forget where he is. His foot taps along the music. He plays two songs and launches into a third before he’s exhausted. His arms fall slack. He heaves.

Then he sees the boy standing there and panics. The boy: small, barefoot, white shirt, long shorts. Very quiet and very still standing at the door. With his strange, urgent expression he stares, blue-eyed, at him, through him.

Mark stares back, startled. He feels dizzy. Somewhat naked, exposed. There’s a weight in his belly. He feels ashamed.

They break away at the same moment. He stores, lurches to the door and past Heachan, and runs upstairs. He rushes into his room and closes the door behind him. Leaning on the door, he breathes. Then he hears a knock behind him. He pushes away and waits.

The sound comes again, louder and more insistent.

“What?” he asks, his voice shaky.

The knocking stops abruptly. Then for some time there is no sound at all.

“Can you do that again?”

Silence. Mark gathers himself. Breathes. He rests his forehead on the door and nods against it. Then, a little shakily, he says, “Yeah. Yeah, I can.”

A pause, then sounds. Heachan has moved away.

 

* * *

 

The water of the sea is deep, dense and dark. Ribs of waves usher it forward. Gorging on stars and moonlight. Inside, Heachan is baking cookies in the dark. Through open windows, he feels a cool humid change and it’s promise of rain. And he’s aware again of that feeling, that end-of-the-world stillness.

But today things are a bit different. In the dark there is music playing. Only he can hear. It moves nodding leaves and collects summer dust and heat. Heachan giggles nervously, shivering, and wonders if he’s drowning, why he can’t think of anything else since he first heard it.

It was last week when he heard it for the first time. It competed with the click of insects, a million of offbeat metronomes. It gusted in fluid snatches. Shutting useless eyes, Heachan inhales and remembers breathing in the cloying heat of the forest. His armhairs hackle. Sound like a voice. Semaphore. It’s not a sound Heachan has ever heard before but he recognises it, it’s as if he has felt it before. Even knows it, maybe.

Now the only sound that he can hear is the sound of the waves. Heachan slips outside to strip his washed sheets from the line. A sudden chill shudders his shoulders. Quickly, he gathers the bundle in his arms and buried hidden in the scent of rain is a memory: of his mother, fondly folding sheets with memories of her own.

Rain always reminded her of home, she said. Once, when it rained on Haechan’s birthday, she gave him a ribbon that used to belong to her own mother, which she tied carefully into his hair. She promised they would visit his grandparents together one day, when it was cold here and warm there. But Heachan grew up and they never did, and then his mother died.

Bed made, he moves back into the kitchen to beat his mix. The television in the living room is off, so Mark must be sleeping. The breeze is gone and the house is suddenly silent. But in his head, there is music playing. A murmur, sad and nostalgic. The sound of lullabies and comfort singing insistent in his head.

 

* * *

 

Mark lays in bed and thinks of Heachan. Listening. So close, so explicitly. He feels restless, afraid even, just thinking about it. His stomach feels all wrong. He stands up and walks outside, for no reason, and searches for something, but isn’t sure for what.

He stares at the sky. Silence. Still.

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the night absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.

Mark closes his eyes and lets his thoughts drift. His face is washed by a strong breeze. And it’s as if he’s holding the violin and she’s weightless. Laying on his shoulders and pressing into his neck, right where she fits.

His hand holding her in a tight grip. Encased. His arms and legs like the ones she doesn’t have. Freckles are scattered at her belly, like a galaxy of dim stars. Mark smears them away with a quickly with a sweaty palm. Bow kisses string. Fingers curl and dive and shimmy down her neck. Fluid and firm. Notes lift and fade like smoke in a dim room. And she whispers things into his ear that only he can hear. Only him.

It’s three forty-two when Mark goes back to glaring at the ceiling of his room. Outside the rain eases and thins to drizzle. Inside a child’s room, Heachan is falling asleep, but it’s not exhaustion taking over but instead, he’s disarmed, suddenly, by the ceaseless sound between his ears.

A voice captured on offshore breeze, even louder than the other day. Heachan’s eyelids, though, are mercifully still and in the cool air, he sighs and gropes, pulling his sheets over himself. The thin cover clings to his skin.

And under the same cloudlayer, for the first time, Mark and Heachan both sleep on past dawn. Both their sheets stay dry.

 

* * *

 

 

As always Heachan is up early to go down to the beach. He worms into a pair of cheap sandals and rubs the strange crust of sleep from his eyes. A lingering damp colludes with the heat and there’s no breeze to move the fetid air. It remains trapped beneath the bruise of an overcast sky.

Heachan moves languidly through the kitchen not taking notice of Mark who stands by the stove, watching him fan away flies with a face set in a hard blank stare.

The air is thick and sticky. Sweat rolls down Mark’s back and flies skirt his head. He doesn’t move. And Heachan walks towards him, heading for the kitchen door. Mark’s blood belts under his skin. A butterfly flutters by. Closer he walks. Mark holds his breath and looks down and watches as Heachan walks past.

He’s as high as Mark’s chin. And he’s right there. He could touch Heachan. And then the boy is out the door.

 

* * *

 

 

The streets are busy today and a steady seabreeze dissolves the heat. The road is filled with hectic people and impatient drivers. People diffuse from stores and restaurants to stroll along the streets. Heachan is among them, munching on the nuts he just bought from the markets, more cautious than usual. The pavement is still warm underfoot. He smells bad perfume, sweat and new books.

Negotiating a sea of knees and shins and shoes, he narrowly avoids an imminent collision with a fast approaching child. The toddler tugs hard at his trousers and Heachan tries to resume the dodging of self-absorbed meteors but instead he has to stop and start and stop and wait. He walks cautiously around a group of women catching up with shierks and hugs.

“Do you need a hand?” someone asks nearby.

“No!” he spins and says shortly. Then: “No. No, thanks,” and offers a weak smile in the general direction of the sound.

He wants to go on but suddenly hesitates to motion forward, stopping sudden and stolid. A stream of idiots announce themselves with fat bass and pace, looking for blind people to kill, and Heachan shuffles back. He waits, then slips quickly to a small street with less people.

If Mark were to hear about this he would scold Heachan and be super upset. Good that he’s quickly forgotten. Swallowed by the surround-sound swelling of noise and bodies.

A few minutes later he’s finally reaches his destination. Blind boy in a crowded cafe. Brings his spoon to the lip of the sugar dispenser. Measures by weight. One. And a half. Stirs. Doesn’t seem to blink. Sips. Ringed by life and noise.

Heachan surfaces upon recognizing a bottom-end riff from the table next to him. A cover song. It’s accompanied badly by a man on amphetamines spanking a tabla. Heachan grimaces on behalf of Michael Jackson. But this too (like rain) unveils a buried hidden vestige.

Revived is the memory of an vinyl–obsessed boy. He used to love the feel of the stuff. Its hiss and crackle. The way he could play it without speakers, without cords or electricity. He still has a pile of records taller than he is, hidden away somewhere in his room.

Back in the days, armed with saved pocket money, he looted dusty stores and the tables of garage sales. He wheedled discounts and snaffled bargains. Loaded his LPs into an pink florid basket and rode them home to play on his mother’s old gramophone (tinkered with and abandoned by Heachan’s inventive Uncle Johnny, who slowed its rotation and adapted its pin so it could play 45s and LPs).

He has always felt music strongly. When he played his Michael Jackson records, he would hopskipjump up and down the hallway blowing a wild Air Trumpet and sliding his feet across the floor as if he were on stage. He tingled all over. He knew all the songs off by heart, especially She's Out of My Life, a song he would always sing to himself.

Some songs he heard, his chest would tighten until it hurt. It was difficult to breathe or swallow. He stood in front of the gramophone absorbing with his eyes closed and he felt like bursting. Fortified and restless. Some songs he poked his head inside the huge open horn and sang as loud as he could. And if he was asked what happiness was, he’d say it was that moment there: yodelling into the snout of that thing.

But then life went dark and the gramophone was wheeled into the basement. No one missed it. And Heachan changed. Music became stuff that he would put in front of noise of a night, like Dark was stuff in front of Light. Just loud enough. It lulled and hushed him both to sleep. Door closed. This much Heachan knows: That music could be somnolent now. That it might lay him down. Like last night.

But what he can’t understand is how a stringed voice on an offshore breeze undoes him and keeps him under, safe. How to explain the blankness? A screen with no projection. How to explain that? The sound that stuck to teflon. That sound that arrests him, and he can’t be arrested. He’s too far away. He’s bolstered by distance; which has shortened as he drew nearer to listen. He didn’t think. He just went. Pushed and pulled. Hard to believe that something can spill through the outside air like that.

That fleshy, woven flow, has hit hard in an empty space. And the sound of it is too many things at once. It’s coarse but earthen but watery but dense but lilting. It’s a riot: contained and falling apart. Tense and gentle, it’s soft strident brittle. It’s how Heachan feels. And that’s it. It does what Michael Jackson could. And it comes in volts.

It tore at him, and he tore away. Strange time to feel so vulnerable. Heachan left quickly. So did Mark. (Heachan had automatically known it was him. He just feels these things.) After an awkward, shaky silence. With a fence between. And he’s been back there. To that same silence. But Mark has promised to play again, didn't he? And this time for him, Heachan, and not himself. 

Had it been wrong to ask for that? Heachan worries. It feels oddly personal now, thinking about it. Playing the violin must have been Mark's secret for a long time and he must have been surprised, maybe even shocked, to have it exposed like that. But why did he keep it a secret in the first place? And what else is he hiding? 

Heachan starts chewing on his lower lip. He never really thought Mark would be hiding something from him. He had thought he was the only one hiding and putting up fences. And thinking of that now, how Mark excludes him from his life, Heachan's heart hurts– it's pounding, stinging and throbbing... And it feels good. 

 

* * *

 

Stores have shut their hinged mouths. Slowly the crowds have filtered out. Behind him, a homeless man hawks and spits thickly into the empty carafe. He looks at the tiny young boy in front of him, and with raised eyebrows he considers calling after him for a quick fuck, but thinks better of it and departs stiffly.

Heachan hears chairs being stacked around him. Across the road, outside the pub, a drunk man in a black coat paces the bus stop. And he gragles the lyric:

> _To an unrecognizable look as we go down our own road_   
>  _Our gazes may reach each other one day_   
>  _Even if it’s in silence, our voices will reach each other_

over and over and over again. A marching beat. It seems to Heachan as a sad mantra. He hears the dingding of last drinks. Drains his second coffee.

And if he allowed it, if he let it run its course, this feeling now could give way to another unwanted surge. And back-back-back he would go. Greeted by another memory. At night. And he would be sitting right there. With misty drizzle and cold wind. The smell of peppermint tea. He would be huddling into a wollen jumper (so that it looked like a he shoved his head up the arse of a fat sheep and pulled down hard).

It would be a busy weekend. And a unwanted hero would be approaching. Slowly. On a skateboard. He would round the big street, on to the terrace. And it would erupt him. The hero wouldn’t wear a trailing red cape but simple shorts and a shite shirt. Arms stretched like wings. A camera would flash.

He would be sitting. He would have no idea. And he would laugh like a self-conscious dance. Like he didn’t fit. Restrained. A timorous, brittle thing. And it would hit him, hotly, suddenly, the shame of it. His farawayness. Of being so freaking close to something, but totally missing it. Like he wasn’t even really here. Half in two worlds. Detached. Apart. And not a part of either.

And the boy on the terrace who only came to help would unintentionally rub it in his face: that he’s alone in his disjunction, separate in any world, in any place. Apart. And against his will would it make him think of just how much of his daily life comprises simply missing things. Just how much eludes him. Just how many kicks he were behind the play. Unravelled, he would entertain these thoughts.

Lee Heachan, the boy who keeps distance above all, would feel excluded. _Would._ Would if he permitted it. If he let it run its course.

Now, jacked on caffeine, Heachan rises. He misses the impatient scowl of the waitress taking his cup and cringes as he slips cautiously into the stink of the public toilet. Then, in fresh air, he wanders aimlessly for a while. And misses a lusty stare. The moon in a puddle. A news-stand headline.

He doesn’t see the string of lights draped straight down the length of the pines, so that they look like a line of giant cucumbers, pinked by a neon glow. He also doesn’t notice his own reflection in that window of the Lebanese restaurant and misses the shock that would have floored him. He would have touched his face, wondered where the roundness went, when the sharp angles took over.

There are smaller chessboards for smaller games on tables nearby. Elderly men sometimes sit there waiting for contestants. He sat there one day, without knowing the other side was occupied by an old guy with a set board.

Heachan started when he spoke. The guy told him that he couldn't play because he wasn’t able to see the pieces. “Bullshit,” Heachan said.

The guy beat him in four moves. Heachan reset the board. Chess was hard at first but it just took practice. And fierce concentration. Keeping the grid set in his mind. Knowing it. Keeping it there. (Then, scrabble. Scrabble was a headfuck.)

They spoke only to move the pieces. They were both stubbornly competitive. When he started cheating after Heachan won the first time, he left him alone. He would have claimed moral victory but since he nabbed one of the guy’s handcrafted knights, Heachan settled for stalemate.

Heachan misses a patrolling police wagon eyeing him with suspicion. He also doesn’t notice a couple making out on their verandah swingchair. And there are some things he can’t bear missing, like the gone and left. Like his father. Like his mother. Absences too big to fill.

He’s so tired of missing. And missing the missing. And maybe that’s why, right now, he spends too long gripping the door handle to Mark’s room, waiting for a sound that he has to hear again.

But if it’s there, he misses it. There is now only a faint scrabbling and the whisper of a chill breeze. He pulls away. Misses a pale face staring at him from the open bathroom door.

 

* * *

  
Mutiny again. In the wake of heavy breathing, memories are spilling. Opened by shut eyelid. With a projection reel flicker, exposing the quartermoon white of Heachan’s eyes.

_(Trapped, trapped, trapped)._

Dreams are forged from stored images. They unsettle stubborn sediments and trap them. Heachan is summoned and shifted to a cloudless, starless night. He sees are boy hovering, faceless, above water. A gust hooks at his flesh and sucks at his hair. Sweeping coldness skimmed from the water’s surface.

No mouth. No ears. No nose. No eyes. Barefoot.

Silverdusted dunes look on like a grandstand. Bleak in the moongleam. The boy laughs with no mouth as he looks on with no eyes and waves to no response.

The water is suddenly messy with flotsam. Seaweed. Feathers. Celestial reflection. Also swimming are a computer, a satellite, a piano, trash. Bottles without messages in them. A grinning inflatable whale. A gramophone with a lily snout. And a dog, paddling in circles

Alone hovering about the water, the faceless boy sees a violin flowing silently towards him. It’s strings are broken and spread like wings, too light to tear the waterskin, thought they seem to row in stunted strokes. It parts a shimmering, furrowed V in its wake. It comes closer. Pulsing above is a big red arrow and three big purple words: You Are Here.

The tide rises. Lapping and slapping and louder. Heachan feels heat underneath his bare toes. It’s blood, he knows, but he doesn’t look down. Feels sticky and itching. He turns to run but his feet are stuck, stuck, stuck to the ground. His head pounds. Feels heat and he starts shaking. So hot, so cold.

Reams of waves claim more and more shore. Louder they are. The sound of fists. Heachan’s legs betray him. He falls. Flat chest hurts. Splash. He’s under. Darkness. Swallowed, he’s sinking. Gulping and thrashing.

 

* * *

 

Sweating and shivering, Heachan frowns and sits up. Different dream, same result. Unnerved, he doesn’t take a shower. In his oversized shirt, he gets moving. Instinct takes him outside. Breathes deep. The pavement is cool. He’s ashamed and resolute. He knows the way.

One. Two. Three step. Mark’s door. He can smell mint and the blush of a flower. A small sound expires from his mouth as he smells it; recognises it. His hand reaches into the darkness and finds Mark’s rough, matted hair damp and the roots.

Heachan’s straight, blank stare doesn’t change. He lets his hand run lower, feeling soft, warm skin. He doesn’t know why he’s here. But it’s working, it’s working. A wash; lambent on his skin. It fills him till he stills. He let’s it.

“Heachan?” Mark asks. Startled maybe. “Are you okay?”

Heachan makes another step toward the warmth, letting his body collapse into it. Mark breathes around him.

“Nightmares?” he mutters against Heachan’s ear. The boy can feel the movement of his lips. They are soft and nothing like nightmares – the place where dreams are bred and shaped and played and replayed; where everything buried surfaces.

Heachan nuzzles himself deeper into the warmth that is Mark’s shoulder. This displaces the numbness that usually protects him and it’s almost as if the warmth, the softness of the other human body transforms him like the music did: It bends, dances, touches his skin and bursts.

A tangible, sentient thing. Touching ... The room roars. It’s an edifice of air, and it threatens to fill him up. It gushes in spires. And if he’s not careful, he’s going to lose it. It’ll flense him, this sound, this music, Mark’s heartbeat. Expose him, spilling, spilling, because it’s working its way inside now. And nothing can get inside, for he shepherds out the world. With a tough stubborn veneer. Brittle now. It’s picking, pecking at him.

His body is so small next to Mark’s, curled in, like a child, clinging to his warmth.

“It’s okay,” Mark says. “I can’t see you like this.”

And everything stops for Heachan as he recognises too well the sound inside this place. Too, too well. And it is not the sounds that brought him here, but he’s heard it before, he’s been there and seen it and is struck here because of it.

“Don’t try to fix me,” he says against Mark’s chest. “There’s nothing to be fixed here inside of me. I am bitter - bitter, but I like it.”

And he does like it, because it’s bitter, and because it’s his heart. This is the reality of living in his body: He is trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that he’s trapped but he can see exactly what he wants. He can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

Is that what he’s doing now? Reaching out… for something. Heachan thinks back to his conversation with Mark a few weeks ago. Maybe they were really all waiting for something to happen that would make their life special. Or rather, bearable.

But maybe he has been bruised too many times. And has hurt too many people. But he keeps on lingering there, in Mark’s heartbeat, the soft void of his breath, and warmth of his smooth skin - letting the world drift, and memories fade, and the time crumble - in Mark’s arms.

Finally, in a low whisper, he says, “I’m a terrible person.”

And for a split second Mark believes him– he expects Heachan to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then he realizes that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

“You don’t look like a terrible person,” he says, feeling a tsunami of thoughts recede and then rise, climbing his throat like a wave of nausea. “But… we are all monsters, somehow. All of us have a piece of ugliness inside of us. I have bad thoughts too. And I’m selfish sometimes, and rude, and I hurt others to feel better. But still… I forgive myself. No matter what others say, you should forgive yourself too. You are not a terrible person, Lee Heachan. I know that. Because I know you and I want all of it. Your anger. Your anxiety. Your sadness. Your stern looks. Your frustrations. Your past. I want all of it. I want all of you.”

Heachan’s chest quivers. His useless eyes are searching for Mark and God, his eyes put the sun to shame. They’re huge and full of emotion and Mark falls right into them, he licks his lips and the salt-sweat and wishes he could taste it from Heachan’s lips instead.

The thought is fleeting, more feeling than words. It pulses through his brain with each beat of his racing heart. No time to dwell, because Heachan is so close and he’s teary eyed and his lips are shaking. A puff leaves his chest—a short, still tired laugh, but one of nervousness. “You are not joking… are you?”

“Not at all,” Mark says. His hand comes up to Heachan’s face. When the boy rest his head in his palm, Mark feels hope sparking at his chest. “Do I exist inside you? You exist… inside me.”

For a moment the world stands still as Heachan just stares straight ahead, his face unmoving, blinking very fast. Then he leans forward, slowly inch by inch, and Mark doesn’t make a single move to stop him. Their noses brush. And then Heachan’s soft lips finally press down on Mark’s.

 

* * *

 

Slender fingers tug and rip at his hair, bury their fingertips painfully into Mark’s skull until they scratch over his scalp and leave a tingling sensation on his skin. Heachan’s mouth is wet and warm on his own but there’s nothing tender between them. Lips gashing and gnawing, tearing at their lips until there’s the copper taste of blood. Mark doesn’t register the throbbing pain of his underlip and neither does Heachan care, if the way he bites down gives anything away.

A shudder runs through Mark’s body and he feels the little strands of his dark curls in his nape rise when Heachan pushes even closer. Mark loses it; he moans into the kiss. His breath tightens as he feels Heachan’s fingertips trace down the side of his throat.

Heachan pulls away from the kiss and Mark moans out loud, this time not because of pleasure but out of annoyance. Don’t stop, and Keep kissing me, he wants to convey. Heachan lets out an exhale just before his full, pouty lips touch Mark’s skin again. This time he’s kissing the skin of his shoulder though and Mark growns as the boy bites the skin there, sucks it in. Leaving sometimes wet kisses and other times rough bites. Covering more and more of Mark’s skin with traces of tenderness.

“Heachan,” Mark helplessly moans and exposing more of his neck to the other boy, hoping for more affection.

Heachan slowly licks over Mark’s collarbones, nuzzles his nose there, then bites the sensitive spot behind Mark’s ear. He sucks in the now red skin and Marks head starts spinning with the warm night air and the feel of Heachan’s lips. His own hands start to caress Heachan’s thighs and when he closes his eyes, he can feel the marks on his skin, his neck, his shoulders.

It’s as if he enters another dimension, one in which his body becomes an undiscovered land. Under Heachan’s hands, he can reinvent things on the surface of his skin. He can imagine his face is a terrain. Heachan’s marks stretching and diving like microravines and mountains, or pinching and puckering like the foothills of a country.

Half of the delight of it is the sound; The sweet moans that escape them, and the slow, drawn out suction of their lips, the echo of their rushing breaths. Almost desperate, Mark pulls at Heachan’s thighs, opening them over his lap. He needs him closer. A moan slips from the boys mouth into Mark’s as Heachan begins to grind on his lap. Like the pull of the moon, Mark’s hands gravitate toward the backside. He massages what he can grab.

Heachan’s lips break from his to whisper, “Take off my clothes…”

Hesitation doesn’t come, nor does the need to rush. Mark brings his hands up under Heachan’s shirt, feeling the hot silk of the boy’s skin as he pushes the fabric from him. He looks down at Heachan slowly grinding body. He is so beautiful.

Mark pulls the boy close again, so perfectly inviting; kissing the back of his jaw, letting his tip of his tongue taste Heachan before each sucking kiss. Heachan’s tortured whimpers echoing softly off the ceiling, his fingers in Mark’s hair, pulling his mouth against his own throat.

“You’re the most beautiful boy I’ve seen…” Mark sighs softly in the boy’s ear.

Heachan’s only response is to bring his hand up blindly and feeling Mark’s skin until he finds his cheek, thumbing Mark’s bottom lip before guided him in so he could suck it, pulling back slowly only to deepen it again.

The feeling of desire is overwhelming. He wants to touch Heachan so badly, wants to kiss him and make love to him. He wants to hold him or be held and he wants to be wanted- it all made his head spin.

His grip tightens on Heachan’s hips, both in desperation and delight. He takes in a deep breath to calm his thoughts, “Do you want to...?” he asks, almost blushing.

As a reply, Heachan gently but firmly pushes Mark’s hands lower and towards his bottom, and Mark relaxed a bit. With shaky fingers he massages the fleshy cheeks, squeezing and groping what he can grab.

When he senses that Heachan is ready for more, he uses his mouth to get the tight muscle to relax. With Heachan on his back and his legs held up by hi’s trembling arms, Mark licks inside and softly eases the muscle apart.

Heachan starts whimpering and moaning a mix of wordless sounds and Mark’s name on breathless sighs. His entire body trembles even as he tries to hold on so that Mark can have better access.

And when he no longer can hold himself up, Mark goes on his knees and pulls the boy towards him. He lifts his lower body up so that Heachan is almost bent in two while being partially held up. His knees are almost to his ears, but it gives Mark the perfect position he needs to really get what he wants.

Once those breathless moans start up again, Mark finds that he can’t stop. He brings Heachan to the brink with his mouth, licking and teasing then dipping into his body and running the length of his tongue around the twitching entrance. His hand holds Heachan’s erection firmly, fingers running up and down the solid, hot length of his cock with just enough pressure that it added pleasure on top of what Mark is doing without taking Heachan's attention away from it.

Not wanting the boy to cum just yet, Mark forces himself to stop and he releases Heachan, letting his body fall back onto the bed.

“I want to… suck you,” mumbles Heachan and Mark almost comes on the spot. He blushes, deeply this time and nods, totally forgetting that Heachan can’t see that. Hearing Heachan speak so brazenly about his desires has brought him to the forefront of his mind. His eyes fall onto Heachan’s parted lips, so plump and inviting.

He cups the right side of Heachan’s face and rubs the pad of his thumb against the sweet swell of the boy’s bottom lip. And Heachan, instead of darting forward to tease his intended goal, covers Mark’s hand with his own.

Deliberately, Heachan swipes the tip of his tongue against Mark’s thumb, leaving a tease of wetness there. Mark’s breath catches in his chest and the desire within him only grows, threatening to overwhelm him if he continues to resist.

“Please,” Heachan murmurs.

How can that word, please, have such an effect on him? How can Heachan, affect him in such a way that it is Mark who feels that needy pulse of want and hunger?

  
There are all these heavy emotions inside of him, not the frustration or the mounting irritation, but something that has been growing within, digging its claws deep into his insides. They spiral and grow, fed by who knows what and they are irrational and completely illogical. It’s maddening and yet, Mark feels that he will simply die if he doesn’t feel them burning inside him.

Heachan is the source. Or the catalyst of these things and looking at him now, Mark feels it as keenly as a blade against his heart. He needs Heachan.

Mark softly presses his thumb deeper into Heachan’s mouth and chases after the dextrous tongue that delivers all those soft moans. And Heachan only teases him all the more for it. His hands grasp Mark’s wrist, as though he’s the one that wants this and will refuse to let Mark go if he tried pulling away.

His eyelashes drop, eyes fluttering closed as he runs his curious tongue over Mark’s invading thumb. He rubs the slick muscle against the pad of Mark’s finger, lightly, before teasing the sensitive sides with quick, almost kittenish licks.

The almost ticklish sensations have mark breathing heavily. It’s too easy to imagine these same sensations being applied to his dick. And when Heachan closes his mouth and actually gives a teasing suck, Mark visibly shudders. His free hand presses against his straining erection, hissing at both the bit of friction and from Heachan’s teasing mouth.

  
To save what little control he has, Mark removes his thumb. With his chest rising and falling a little faster than normal, Mark lets himself fall back on the bed. He spreads his legs wide, giving Heachan more room to work.

At the touch of Heachan’s plush lips against his dick, Mark feels all the frustration that has been nagging him ebb away. A different kind of tension takes its place, but this one is welcomed.

Every teasing lick, every stroke of Heachan's hand… the light, almost gentle sucking that the boy applies, all accumulated together. Mark rolls his head back, eyes closed as he savors the pleasure Heachan is giving him.

It isn't hurried or rushed, but Heachan isn't aiming to tease him. In a way, Heachan’s intent on giving Mark a much needed stress relief and Mark seizes the opportunity gratefully. His hand threads through the soft, blonde locks of Heachan's hair.

The warm tingles that have Mark floating in a pleasurable haze become more and more intense. Mark softly pushes the boy’s head off his dick and shudders.

He knows exactly what he wants to do, and he feels no fear. Only a trembling anticipation, their desires winding them closer and closer together.

 

* * *

 

 

Mark loves to watch his own fingers. Sliding, punching, rolling, tickling notes so they sing like nothing else ever has. He loves the way his instrument rises and falls and settles into his slim frame. Clicking into place, like she fits. And he loves the limp wristed fabric sway of the bow. A loose, liquid extension of his arm.

And Heachan sits opposite on the same old rug, their magic carpet. Socks down, scowl removed. Smiling with Mark, this midget. Thin, dishevelled, scruffy. His toes curl and he is lost in it. A feisty rush fizzles up Mark’s back, imbues him with an unbearable energy. He wants to runaround and dance so badly. Do something with it.

A shudder ghosts from his spine. He winds his bow an watches Heachan’s stiffness and coldness disappear before his very eyes. Like magic.

But trace back from the tips; away from that vibrato and the flurry of Mark’s fingers, through the jolt of wrist and joint and tendon, up the knotted atrophy of that forearm, and there’s a different rush in this room. A slower, seeping, pulshing rush. It stems from a tiny tear in a tiny cluster of vessels.

There, in the hinge of the arm. A calm collection of blood. Doctors call it haemophilia. From the Greek; haemo – blood, and philia – affection. Mark doesn’t. And he knows enough about doctors to disagree with bitter conviction. Mark doesn’t have affection for his blood. Terminally stupid blood. A few factors short of a blood clot.

Plasma spills and spreads with every bloat and laps from that ticking heart. With no plug. Nothing. It’s a slow, excruciating, pointless stampede of cells. And it will continue to flow, building pressure under the skin. Distending the muscle flesh until it’s taut and tight. Unable to break the skin, it will push back inwards. It has nowhere else to go. It will suck into the joints and strangle nerves.

But back here on a Wednesday afternoon, Mark also goes to another place. Like magic, his own stiffness disappears. He tells Heachan the story that his mother had told him years ago. He explains how the violin he’s playing now was carved by wizards long long ago, using a secret enchanted wood. They said it had special healing powers.

Heachan laughs because it’s silly. Mark laughs because he’s bitter.

He is, he believes, relentlessly fucked by irony. Painkillers are mere effects with side relief. For years he has been applying certain flowers and vegetable roots to his elbow joints. He imagines it reduces the inflammation. However, it also eliminated stagnant blood and invigorated its flow. It makes bleeds harder to staunch. It takes as much as it gives.

The best medicine is his violin though. The sound of her, the playing of her calms him. Numbs him blissfully for the duration. He needs that sound to fill his lungs and convince them to push back outwards. But she also presses against his chest, she wears red sores into his shoulders and neck and grates his joints. She tears tendons and vessels and ligaments. Bleed by bleed. Leeches the use of his body while he soughts to reprieve in hers.

And his blood sits. Heavy. An unarmed bomb. It waits.

Damn eternity, he thinks while looking at Heachan, the boy he loves. If I can't have eternity, I want the present, forever and forever.

 

 

 

 


End file.
